McGuffin Ho! one of the Knights will show you the way

Teams were happy to get out of their vans at Inspiration Point in the Presidio. The day was heating up. It was a time to air out, to blink the sunlight, to gather around a puzzle.

This puzzle was fun: a knight word search. All of the words to find were based on knights and chivalry. Hmm, I don't have the puzzle here, but I think maybe we didn't have the words to search for, but just clues to those words. Like we might have the clue "sought the Green Knight" and look for "GAWAIN". The words weren't hidden along the usual ups, downs, and 45-degree diagonals. Instead, they were straight lines of knights' moves a la

abcdefghijkN
lmnopqrsItuv
wxyzabAcdefg
hijkWlmnopqr
stAuvwxyzabc
Gdefghijklmn

When we were done finding words, there were some letters left over. In classic word-search fashion, we read them across, hoping for a hidden message. There wasn't one. Someone noticed that the letters were connected by a knight's tour. Greg started figuring this out. It was a tough, tangled path. I looked at part of what he'd figured it out. I wasn't a good puzzler, but I grew up in this town and could spot some landmark names—we wanted Vaillancourt Fountain at Justin Herman Plaza.

Next: Trickledown: Interrupting the Flow

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